About Christopher Gavula

Chris has been a COBOL programmer, a desktop support technician, network engineer, telecommunications manager, and even a professional musician. Currently, he is focused on deploying Voice over IP technologies in a large, corporate setting. He started working full-time at the tender age of 14, even before there were PCs, and will probably be working and trying to finish “just one more project” as he’s lowered into the grave.

A Little History… A while back I took the plunge and made the shift from an iPhone to a Windows phone, first with a Nokia 900 and later with a 920. It was an interesting exercise. I learned a lot, discovered some new ways of working, and learned to make some compromises. I even learned that some things I thought …

A few weeks OK I bought a shiny new Red Nokia Lumia 920. Generally, I love it, although I am STILL waiting for my wireless charging base to show up. It’s not perfect, in some ways far from it, but the overall approach the OS takes to delivering apps and services is a good one for the way that I …

A while back I did an experiment where I switched from an iPhone to a Lumia 900. I liked a lot of things about the 900, but in the end some of the limitations and missing applications drove me back to the iPhone. Now Windows Phone has made the rather painful transition from 7.x to 8.x and Nokia has released …

A lot has happened in the past few years in foreign language instruction. It’s a global world and thanks to the Internet, you can be taught a foreign language by native speakers from anywhere in the world. You can converse with them and other learners from the comfort of your own home with just a minimal investment in hardware and …

This has been a busy and bumpy year for the Nokia Lumia 900. Just released this spring, it was already declared a dead-end device by Microsoft shortly after its arrival as Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 7.5 phones wouldn’t be updated to Windows Phone 8. Although this wasn’t a complete surprise (due to the hardware limitations of the current devices), …

A short time ago I tried swapping my iPhone for a Windows Phone 7. If you read my posts on the subject, then you know I learned a lot of interesting things, good and bad, about the platform. This time I’m focused on my tablet. I’m back to try one of the most heavily discussed gadgets this year, the Google …

Lately I’ve been in a funk. I thought, at first, it was an Apple funk. I thought it might be about the fact that Apple today doesn’t seem to have the same excitement and vision as it did under Steve Jobs. I thought it might be about a sequence of products that is becoming very evolutionary instead of revolutionary. I …

So I’m working though my latest summer sinus headache and I see the news – AT&T has finally announced (as expected) that they are going to follow Verizon in offering shared data plans. And, like Verizon’s offering, the plans all include unlimited voice and texting plus a fixed amount of data. The primary difference you notice between the AT&T and …

Many of you know that I recently made the move over to Windows Phone as my daily driver. On the whole I’ve been pretty happy with it, but my big hopes have been pinned around the potential the platform has. Today MS made some announcements about the upcoming Windows Phone 8 (OS and devices)– some good.. some bad. As a recent …

Yesterday, the HTC Titan that Judie is loaning me for this experiment arrived on my doorstep. I opened the box she had packed it in, saw the AT&T HTC Titan box inside, and I actually stared at it for a few minutes pondering how this process was going to be a lot of fun. But it was also likely to …

I’m an iPad user (I write many of my posts on an iPad these days), and I have a big interest in tablets and tablet technology. Lately, I’ve been reading a bit about Windows 8 and the new “RT” version for is specifically for tablets. By the way, for those that don’t know “RT” stands for runtime. There’s a bit …

I’ve been considering something for a while now. Something that, for me, was almost unthinkable even a short time ago. But now I want to mix things up a bit and try something new. So after some internal debate, I’ve decided to try a new smartphone platform. Although the Android platform never offered anything that I found to be …

I had a bad purchase experience recently that came to a conclusion this week. I purchased a Mophie Juice Pack Plus from a vendor on Amazon. I noticed that the build quality wasn’t quite as nicely done as other Mophie units I had, but I figured it was just a manufacturing variation or maybe it was just that this was a …

Long time readers of this site may remember that in the past, I have reviewed many different sites, apps and solutions to assist with learning a foreign language. Now I’m looking at some newer language learning sites, namely Babbel and LiveMocha, that offer some interesting and unique things. In addition to the sites, Babbel offers companion apps for both iOS devices …

I had a first generation iPad. It was an amazingly useful and functional device for me I loved the unit, but it wasn’t the thinnest. I rarely tried to carry my iPad with a keyboard, because once I put the iPad and a keyboard into my backpack I might was well have been carrying a laptop! When the iPad 2 …

About a month ago the iPhone 4s unlocks started to appear. This is an excellent thing if you want to use your locked iPhone 4s (especially AT&T users!) outside of your normal carrier. Since AT&T fees overseas are astronomical and don’t even work in all countries (even when the GSM radios support connection) this is one of the only ways to …

image courtesy THG – The Hunger Games Blog at http://thg-thehungergames.blogspot.com/ It seems that everywhere you turn people are talking about the release of the feature film The Hunger Games this week. Here at Gear Diary, we are the same way and we have been burning up the wires talking about it too! Some have read the books, some not. Some …

I’m a tech guy. I’m in a tech-related job and I love tech and gadgets and all the good things they bring to life. But sometimes, just sometimes, technology gets in the way. Sometimes we find ourselves unable to see past it and unable to function without it. And sometimes that causes us to fail to see the real problem. …

I’m a fan of navigation apps for mobile devices. I’ve been talking about navigation applications for a lot of years now and Navigon has been one of the more interesting players for a long time. They have history going back to the Windows Mobile days, consistently offering one of the nicest looking apps in the field. Now Navigon, a part …

Garmin, who seem to be going like gangbusters lately (including the addition of Navigon to their lineup last year) have released a preview of what they are showing at CES this week. In their press release they are announcing some new and update products including: – Garmin Smartphone Link is the first Android app that provides live services to a …

image by signap I haven’t posted in a while. Life has a way of getting in the way of the things you’d like to do sometimes. I missed writing here – a lot – but the world is a crazy place (a new job, a new city, a new apartment). Things are finally getting back to a semblance of …